An amphibian writer, translator, poltergeist,researcher... my doppelganger pretends to be a Professor of English, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Poetics of Depression and Asthma as a Trope

I don't know how long I have been living with the things like depression, asthma and poetry. All the three erupted with puberty I think. My poetry is poetry of a depressed man, an asthmatic and hence depressed and asthmatic in its own imaginative way.My poetics are the poetics of depression and my tropes are the tropes of suffocation.

I pressed the panic button when asthma went completely out of hand after October 2006 and I started thinking seriously about some alternative therapy like Pranayama, Ayurveda or something equally exotic. Actually I had lost faith in all these things long time back after trying them. But then I thought lets give them one more chance.

I even consulted a counceller and a psychotherapist. From past month or two I am on anti-depressants.It seemed that they were working but after a recent bout of asthma a week back, the things are bad. I feel so low that I dont feel like going out or even leaving my bed. I just want to be alone and probably I have not cried to my heart's content. And what's more, I don't feel like writing too. Which is really bad. Poetry helped me to survive and if I lose it, I don't know what to do and where to go.

The contemporary Marathi poetry scenario is quite dispiriting too. I feel hopeless after looking and participating in various so called `debates' and `controversies' over contemporary Marathi poetry. People's views about poetry areso so crude and simplistic that it has become impossible to reason with them. I feel I should not have started writing criticism in the first place and I feel I should not have got so involved with my contemporaries so much. They are bad influences on your creativity at times.

Yes. I have to write with absolutely no expectation of recognition or even a sensible response. I have to live with these things and get used to them, I think. The real test for any artist, and I hold that poet is an artist, is to live without any recognition, after all what else does any artist hope for in her or his life? To write with perfect hopelessless, thats the test of your integrity as a poet and appearing for this exam. If I clear this exam, I am a very good poet indeed.

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Sachin C. Ketkar (b. 1972) is a bilingual writer,
translator, editor, blogger and researcher based in Baroda, Gujarat. His recent
publication is a collection of Marathi critical articles on contemporary
Marathi Poetry, globalization and translation studies titled Changlya Kavitevarchi Statutory Warning:
Samkaleen Marathi Kavita, Jagatikikarn ani Bhashantar (2016). His Marathi
collections of poems are Jarasandhachya
Blogvarche Kahi Ansh (2010) and Bhintishivaicya Khidkitun Dokavtana, (2004). His poetry in English
include Skin, Spam and Other Fake
Encounters: Selected Marathi Poems in translation, (2011), and A Dirge for the Dead Dog and Other
Incantations (2003). Several of his writings on translation are published
as (Trans) Migrating Words: Refractions
on Indian Translation Studies (2010).

He has extensively translated from Marathi and
Gujarati.Most of his translations of
contemporary Marathi poetry are collected in the anthology Live Update: An Anthology of Recent Marathi Poetry (2005) edited by
him. Along with numerous recent Gujarati writers, he has rendered the fifteenth
century Gujarati poet Narsinh Mehta into English for his doctoral research. He
has also translated the work of the well-known contemporary Gujarati writers
like Manilal Desai, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakkar, Jayant Khatri, Mangal
Rathod, Jaydev Shukla, Rajesh Pandya, Rajendra Patel, Nazir Mansuri, Ajay
Sarvaiya and Mona Patrawala. He has also translated poems of Ted Hughes and
fiction by Jorge Luis Borges and Adam Thopre’s into Marathi. He won ‘Indian
Literature Poetry Translation Prize’, awarded by Indian Literature Journal,
Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in 2000.

He holds a doctorate from VN South Gujarat
University, Surat and works as Professor in English, Faculty of Arts, The
Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. He is also Coordinator of
the department research project under UGC SAP DRS II on “Representing the
Region: Literary Discourses, Social Movements and Cultural Forms in Western
India, 1960-2000.